Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xvi, 324 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-7832-1.
During the early 1980s, when I first traveled in the Tibetan regions of China, I would often ask the Han Chinese drivers in whose vehicles I journeyed the names of the landmarks and sites that we passed. The reply was almost inevitably the same: zheige difang mei you mingzi, “this place has no name.” Tibetans, of course, did have names for these places, but as they were largely unknown to the small numbers of Han then in Tibet, who viewed their residence there as tantamount to exile, those names, the Tibetan names, were as good as nonexistent. Between Tibet as a meaningful landscape for its indigenous population, and as a nameless, senseless wasteland for the Han who had the misfortune to be there, there was apparently no meeting point whatsoever. One of the challenges for China during the past decades, therefore, has been to generate a new world of meaning on Tibetan soil, one which, if all goes as planned, Tibetans and Han will one day share.
This dilemma is at the core of geographer Emily Yeh’s perceptive and well-researched study, Taming Tibet, which documents successive waves of change in the Chinese state’s development of the Tibetan environment, focusing on the Tibetan Autonomous Region’s capital, Lhasa, and its immediate surroundings. The process described by Yeh, which she terms “territorialization,” is materially manifest in the political, economic and technological innovations and policies broadly serving to integrate the land into the frameworks embraced by the Chinese nation-state, but her argument centrally concerns the subjectivities thereby engendered, for which landscape is inevitably a field for the production of value and meaning.
Yeh identifies three main phases in China’s territorialization of Tibet: the first, beginning during the 1950s and continuing down to the period of post-Cultural Revolution Dengist reform, centred on communalization and the creation of state farms, and sought to redefine the relations between labour and land along socialist lines. The next phase, spanning the 1980s and 1990s, emphasized economic development and the shift to a market economy. Large numbers of Han migrants were, for the first time, permitted to enter Tibet to contribute to the development process, which involved considerable investment from eastern China. Tibetans were frequently marginalized by the new economy that evolved, with which they were sometimes related as renters. Finally, after 2000, new attention was devoted to urbanization, and the transformation of Lhasa and other Tibetan cities and towns into modern Chinese urban centres.
These three phases of development are emphasized respectively in the three major sections into which Taming Tibet is organized, tellingly entitled “Soil,” “Plastic” and “Concrete.” An important leitmotif throughout Yeh’s work is the sharp tension between Chinese expectations—more often in fact a demand—for “gratitude” on the part of Tibetans for the benefits of socialization, economic growth and urban development, and the resentment, recalcitrance or reaction with which Tibetans have sometimes responded. The massive Lhasa riot of March 2008, in which many Han shops and businesses were torched, is among the key points in Yeh’s narration of the mutual incomprehension that festers around the trope of gratitude.
Like many American scholars of the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, Yeh peppers her work with references to the perspectives of (mostly continental) literary and social theorists, including Agamben, Benjamin, Debord and de Certeau. She is restrained, critical and judicious in this, however, and her gestures to these and other theoreticians do serve to clarify her arguments. Particularly strong in this respect is chapter 7, “Engineering Indebtedness and Image,” which makes good use of the category of the “gift” as elaborated in the writings of Mauss, Douglas, Sahlins and others. A welcome, though perhaps not quite intended, implication of Yeh’s effort to reach beyond contemporary China-Tibet scholarship is that Chinese development in Tibet is seen to be not so much a sui generis case as it is a further iteration (albeit a particularly poignant one) of widespread paradoxes and contradictions in the structures of contemporary developing states.
In a concluding “Afterword,” Yeh turns her attention to the wave of self-immolations that has occurred over the past several years, above all in the eastern Tibetan regions of Sichuan and Qinghai. To do this was not without considerable risk, for the causes of and reasons for this most tragic manifestation of Tibetan discontent are much debated, as is the authoritarian Chinese reaction to it. It is to Yeh’s credit that, though devoting only three pages to this difficult issue, she trivializes it not at all. Indeed, her analytic of territorialization proves to be unusually illuminating in this context.
Taming Tibet is notably well written, its accessibility enhanced by the narration of revealing episodes and anecdotes from Yeh’s fieldwork experiences or earlier history. It should certainly be read by all who wish to understand current circumstances in Tibet, as well as Chinese development at large.
Matthew T. Kapstein
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, France and The University of Chicago, Chicago, USA